XI.

BUT THEY DID NOT CONTACT WES on Wednesday or Thursday. Delaney went about her work these two days, digitizing and turning to paste hundreds of heirlooms, oil paintings, middle-school science projects, about twelve thousand photos, then sending their digital versions to clients from around the world with rudimentary and often incorrect captions made by an insentient system. The work was repetitive but just varied enough to induce a kind of hypnosis that Delaney found soothing. And Winnie rarely stopped talking.

On her desktop screen there was a grid of camera feeds—at least thirty-two by Delaney’s casual count. Each of Winnie’s children wore a cam, and their feeds each occupied one box, their schoolrooms another ten or so, her husband’s cam and workplace another six, with at least a dozen monitoring her home, her parents’ home, and what seemed to be an elderly relative in an assisted living center. There were no moments in any day that Winnie didn’t know where each of her children was, where her husband and parents were and what they were doing. If anyone did something out of the ordinary, AI would flag it and she could play it back to see if it merited her attention or correction.

“You have your parents on cams, I hope?” Winnie asked her. “They must be getting older …”

Delaney was so startled to be asked a question that it took her a moment to answer. “I do,” she said. It seemed noncommittal and banal enough to discourage any follow-up.

“You know, I’ve been meaning to tell you that you can keep in touch with them here. Have you done any participating today?”

“Not yet,” Delaney said.

“Let’s get ten minutes in,” Winnie said, and lunged for her phone. Delaney got hers.

“We do anything we want?” Delaney asked.

“Company stuff, personal stuff, anything,” Winnie said. “It’s important to keep up with your personal relationships. They really emphasize that here.”

Winnie had turned her back to her and was gone, her face unusually close to her phone, thumbs flying. Delaney churned through her feeds and accounts. Her mom sent her a picture of a neighbor’s new car; she sent back a smile. Rose, their mail carrier, sent a photo of her son’s new girlfriend holding a baby; Delaney sent a rainbow. Ads for tampons appeared, and for guns and gum and a heat-saving kind of double-paned glass. A college friend sent a minivid of a volcano currently erupting in Chile. Unsure if a smile or frown was appropriate, Delaney found and sent an emoji of a worried-looking unicorn. On her Every feed there were 311 notices from that day alone. She sent them into Wes’s auto-churn app and moved into her news feed. A minivid of a couple being carjacked and shot to death in Ukraine appeared and thereafter was part of Delaney’s mind. It was followed by a survey: Would you like to see more like this?

“Oh look,” Winnie said, and she pointed to one of the boxes on her screen. A handsome man was speaking in front of a phalanx of American flags. “Have you watched him? Tom Goleta?”

Delaney had been following him closely for months. Goleta was a presidential candidate who posed—as much as any political entity could—an existential threat to the Every. Word was he’d be coming to campus in a few weeks.

“He’s very tough on this place,” Winnie said, as she sent a bin of porcelain cups and plates to the fire. “I can’t figure out why Mae invited him here. Doesn’t that seem unwise?”

It was no longer exotic to have a gay presidential candidate. In fact, since the advent of the Indiana mayor—never president but now a senator—no presidential election had been without one. Though, to be sure, every gay candidate had been in a certain mold—mild, married, Midwestern. Tom Goleta was all of these things, and added a fourth M—Methodist. His résumé seemed precision-sculpted to create the ultimate Every foe. He had been a formidable trial attorney, then a consultant, then a deputy head of the FCC, then on the antitrust task force that had exposed collusion between the world’s six remaining oil conglomerates. He ran for Senate with no prior election experience and won by eight points against an admittedly aging and error-prone Republican opponent who could not pronounce quinoa.

Goleta was one of the few politicians who had not succumbed to going Seen. For ten years it had been the norm, whether the constituents wanted it or not. To broadcast one’s days, one’s meetings and hearings and campaign events spoke of transparency: I have nothing to hide, so watch me. Only a smattering of leaders were still dark, and most were anti-tech crusaders. Goleta insisted his interest in the Every was not that of a crusader, and that his frequent allusions to monopolies and the near-certain applicability of anti-trust legislation was not a crusade. But when he decided to run for president, the Every emerged as a central focus of his platform; his attacks, even if rhetorically mild, had a populist flavor and played particularly well in the thousands of towns that had acre-sized data centers in their midst that employed few or no locals in their construction and staffing or maintenance, and somehow found a way to avoid all taxes.

Delaney craned her head to look at Winnie’s screen. Goleta’s parents hailed from two of the hemisphere’s calmest places—father from Belize, mother from Davenport, Iowa—and his demeanor was preternaturally at ease. He seemed never nervous, never unloved. His jaw was strong, his eyes sensitive, all-seeing. He was always noticing someone in the crowds around him, someone who might need a moment of connection with him, a few seconds they would not forget. In the video Winnie wanted Delaney to see, he was standing in front of a hundred young voters outside the latest iteration of Antioch College.

“My people have been in the U.S. since 1847,” he began. “My great-great-grandfather, a white man, was a typesetter for an abolitionist newspaper in Alton, Illinois. Because he would not leave his post, would not leave that press, he was killed by a pro-slavery mob. I have his diary, and it says some interesting things about the standards he lived by as a typesetter. He actually refused to typeset pro-slavery sentiments—that goes without saying—but he also refused to typeset lies. It’s in his diary. ‘To typeset a lie is a crime. It’s taking a back-alley whisper and making it a national scream.’”

Winnie paused the video and turned to Delaney, her jaw slack. “And his husband is hotter than he is.” Delaney was unsure if Winnie had missed the central message of the video, or had simply moved on to more prurient interests. Winnie spent a minute finding a few choice photos of his husband Rob, a city planner, whose Nordic masculinity somehow made Goleta, who looked like he could lift a car, seem anemic by comparison. Winnie unpaused the video.

“Now we have the Every,” Goleta continued, “which has no problem disseminating any lie you pay them to. They’ve distributed countless lies about me and Rob, about our families, about Rob’s military service, about my religion. I think that’s wrong, and I think my great-great-grandfather would find that wrong, too. The idea that the Every is like a phone company, and is only carrying messages on wires with no obligation to the truth, is so dishonest it does not warrant a retort. They are publishers, for two reasons: one, the messages they send are seen by masses of people—sometimes billions—and two, they disseminate the printed word in a way that is permanent. Period. That is radically and inarguably different than carrying private spoken messages from one person to another, as the phone company once did. It’s the difference between a note passed between two kids in class, and a kind of skywriting that can be seen instantly by everyone in the world, and that’s everlasting. And if you disseminate untruths, you are liable for any and all damage that lie does. This is such a simple application of libel law that it’s flummoxed lawmakers and regulators for decades now. But it’s time to act. I don’t care if it’s social media or some wiki. If you provide the platform to spread these lies, you are accountable. I will hold you accountable.”

Again Winnie paused and turned to Delaney, her eyes agog.

“How do we counter that?” she asked.

Delaney had no answer. Over the years, members of Congress, and governors, and presidential candidates long before Goleta, had tried and failed—had immolated in towering fireballs—while attempting to take on the Every. Invariably that candidate would find themselves on the wrong end of scandal. Invariably there would be mountains of evidence made conveniently available to social media and attorneys general. Digital messages would emerge containing unpardonable beliefs, statements, photos, searches. Invariably a digital mob would come for them and amplify these flaws and transgressions. With a hundred other battles to wage, more approachable dragons to slay, it had been years since any politician had suited up to fight the Every.

Just as Delaney was contemplating Goleta, and how he might do the job she intended to do—but far more effectively, publicly, and permanently—Winnie extinguished the screen.

“Dream Friday!” she said. “Your first one!”